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Examples of bourgeois in a Sentence

Indignation about the powers that be and the bourgeois fools who did their bidding—that was all you needed … You were an intellectual. —Tom Wolfe, Harper's, June 2000

Even before the 19th century was over, successive waves of collection mania had rolled across Europe and America, submerging country homes and bourgeois town houses in ferns and faux-Grecian ruins … —Liesl Schillinger, New York Times Book Review, 7 Feb. 1999

Or is Sartre's existentialism to be understood as only a way station in his transit from a bourgeois intellectual to a Marxist ideologue? —Walker Percy, "The State of the Novel,"1977,
in Signposts in a Strange Land, 1991

… the United States … was the bourgeois nation par excellence, in which, it might be said, the values of trade were transmogrified into ideals of freedom. —Robert Penn Warren, Democracy and Poetry, 1975

Recent Examples of bourgeois from the Web

Running June 13-July 7, 2019, the dark comedy unearths, via a skinned cat, the anarchy that lies beneath the appearance of bourgeois tranquility.

Where those lessons do resonate is with young people in our highly individualistic bourgeois society—a society that keeps them focused on themselves and teaches them that personal choice, individual rights and self-definition are all that is sacred.

This aesthetic in turn serves to centralize and privilege the place of the bourgeois media consumer even as that consumer is shown to be endangered by the very technologies that enable his or her position.

These example sentences are selected automatically from various online news sources to reflect current usage of the word 'bourgeois.' Views expressed in the examples do not represent the opinion of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback.

History of bourgeois

Bourgeois is often mistakenly used to refer to people of considerable wealth or status, possibly because the French pronunciation causes us to associate it with opulence, yet the word is of decidedly middle-class origins (and meaning). It first appeared as a noun signifying “an inhabitant of a town” in the 1564 work _ A Discourse Wrytten by M. Theodore de Beza_: “the Lordes of Strasbourgh consented, vpo condition that he should be alwayes a Bourgeois of their towne.” Because many town-dwellers made their living in business and commerce, bourgeois became synonymous with the social class of such people, namely, the middle class. During the nineteenth century, in Marxist writings, the word became associated with capitalism and took on a negative connotation.
Bourgeois may function as either a noun or an adjective. In modern parlance, it has come to suggest overmuch concern with respectability and wealth.

Origin and Etymology of bourgeois

Middle French, from Old French burgeis townsman, from burc, borg town, from Latin burgus

Examples of bourgeois in a Sentence

For many, Nietzsche has always been a bugaboo, though some regard him as an heroic destroyer of idols, the invigorating voice of skepticism, and a revealer of those embarrassing actualities that the pieties and protestations of the bourgeois have customarily concealed. —William H. Gass, Harper's, August 2005

With exceptions like Rousseau, the philosophes were elitists. They enlightened through noblesse oblige in company with noblemen, and often with a patronizing attitude toward the bourgeois as well as the common people. —Robert Darnton, The Kiss of Lamourette, 1990

Recent Examples of bourgeois from the Web

If those seemed to be trying too hard, other looks achieved the balance Elman was after, inspired both by Trigère the woman, who embraced radicalism and the bourgeois, and her work.

My life had been sweet and dull, a normal bourgeois Petersburg girlhood: studying, going to the kinotheater on Nevsky Prospect – at first accompanied by my governess but later with my brothers, with Mina.

These example sentences are selected automatically from various online news sources to reflect current usage of the word 'bourgeois.' Views expressed in the examples do not represent the opinion of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback.